Keqi Tang Named Battelle Distinguished Inventor
Congratulations to Dr. Keqi Tang at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on being named a Battelle Distinguished Inventor. This annual award is given to Battelle staff who have 14 or more U.S. patents to their credit as a result of their work at Battelle or Battelle-operated national laboratories. He joins more than 60 inventors from Battelle-managed labs, 21 of which have been from PNNL, in receiving this honor.
Dick Smith to Receive Award for Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry
Congratulations to Dr. Richard (Dick) D. Smith, Director of Proteomics at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the 2013 Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry by the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. He was selected for the development of the electrodynamic ion funnel, a broadly applicable tool used in mass spectrometry for ion focusing and manipulation at elevated pressures that challenged conventional approaches.
PNNL Researchers Discuss Increasing Interest in Scientific Fields via Women @ Energy
While women make up slightly more than half of the US workforce and half of the college-educated workforce, they are underrepresented in the nation's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, jobs. To encourage more women to consider STEM careers, the Department of Energy built a webpage with articles about women who work in STEM areas for the Department, including the national labs. As they state on their page: "We hope that the stories of these, and many more, women in STEM can inspire others as they think about the future. Only 24% of the STEM workforce is female, an alarming gap as over 51% of the workforce overall is female."
Cybernetic Model Developed to Predict Shewanella Metabolic Behavior
To further the quest to harness microbes for beneficial uses, scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Purdue University developed a promising computational tool for analyzing microbial flux distribution and metabolic engineering. They used the Lumped Hybrid Cybernetic Model (L-HCM), developed by Purdue researchers Dr. Hyun-Seob Song and Dr. Doraiswami Ramkrishna, to predict and simulate the metabolic dynamics of Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 during aerobic growth in a bioreactor.
Striking While the Iron Is Hot
Heme c is an important iron-containing post-translational modification found in many proteins. It plays an important role in respiration, metal reduction, and nitrogen fixation, especially anaerobic respiration of environmental microbes. Such bacteria and their c-type cytochromes are studied extensively because of their potential use in bioremediation, microbial fuel cells, and electrosynthesis of valuable biomaterials.
